The GNOME Project has released GNOME 3.12 today. The next milestone release in the GNOME 3 series includes many new features, enhancements and updates, as well as new capabilities and APIs for application developers. The new version continues to improve the GNOME 3 user experience and includes many small bug fixes and enhancements.

Speaking on behalf of the GNOME Release Team, Matthias Clasen said “This is an exciting release for GNOME, and brings many new features and improvements, including app folders, enhanced system status and high-resolution display support.” He also thanked the GNOME community for their work on the release, saying that “This six months’ effort wouldn’t have been possible without the whole GNOME community, made of contributors and friends from all around the world”.

Major features for this release include:

A significant update to the experience for finding and installing applications.Major facelifts for the Videos and gedit applications.Greater high-resolution display support.Big updates for the Software and Web applications.Improved start up times as well as more efficient resource usage.A new application folders feature, which lets you organize your apps.3.12 is also a major release for developers, and comes with new interface widgets and APIs, as well as improved documentation.

The release contains many other improvements, which you can read about in the release notes.

The latest GNOME release has been met with anticipation by the project’s partners. Christian Schaller, manager of Red Hat’s Desktop Team, said: “Red Hat is very pleased to see the GNOME community continuing to push the GNU/Linux desktop forward. We are looking forward to the innovations in GNOME 3.12 arriving in future versions of Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.” GNOME 3 is already in use by many companies who will benefit from the improvements in the new release.

Arun S A G, Software Development Engineer at Yahoo Inc said “GNOME is the desktop environment of choice for many Yahoo developers. It provides a stable foundation for GNU/Linux power users to get things done, from reading emails to writing code.”

The GNOME Foundation thanks all of the contributors for their hard work, perseverance, and vision in this release.